Episode 93: Business Valuation with Matt Stelzman, ASA, ABV, CVA, MAFF
In this season of The Data Sleuth Podcast, titled "Conversations about Fraud," guest host Justin Burns, managing partner of Space Coast Forensics in Brevard County, Florida, tackles topics including embezzlement, collaborative divorce, economic damages, construction fraud, and more. In each episode, Justin is joined by an industry expert to help tell the story behind the numbers and explore the latest in fraud detection and prevention.
In today’s episode we discuss business valuations with Matt Stelzman, ASA, ABV, CVA, MAFF. Our conversation includes:
What all goes into a business valuation?
What does a business valuation expert do when a client has also engaged a forensic accountant?
Why Matt wants the attorneys to allow the experts to talk to each other before trial.
How to get ahead of potential questions from opposing counsel when testifying.
GUEST BIO
As a Principal, Forensic, Litigation, and Valuation Practice Leader. Matt brings nearly 20 years of experience to the Windham Brannon's Forensics, Litigation and Valuation Team. Most of his cases involve some form of litigation, including valuations for marital dissolution purposes, lost earnings and lost profits calculations, wrongful termination or death cases, co-mingled funds, personal injury analysis, and economic damages. His client base is just a broad as his experience, having worked on cases involving local, small-owned businesses to global multi-billion-dollar corporations. Matt has spent time in the courtroom as an expert witness, testifying on the results of his findings.
Matt is an adjunct finance professor at John Brown University and Bryan College. He sits on the Executive Advisory Board and is a liaison to the Ethics Oversight Board for the National Association of Certified Valuators & Analysts (NACVA). He served on its Litigation Forensics Board from 2014-2016 and has served as a liaison to NACVA’s Valuation Credentialing Board.
Matt is a frequent speaker on various topics related to business valuation and litigation support services, having traveled as far as Tanzania in East Africa to present to business executives. Matt earned his undergraduate degree and MBA from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. His certifications include a Master Analyst in Financial Forensics (MAFF), Certified Valuation Analyst (CVA), and Accredited Senior Appraiser (ASA). Matt is a member of the AICPA, NACVA and the American Society of Appraisers.
Website: windhambrannon.com
RESOURCES MENTIONED IN TODAY’S EPISODE
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Transcript
Leah Wietholter:
Hi, I'm Leah Wietholter, CEO and founder of Workman Forensics, and this is the Data Sleuth podcast. For the 2024 season, we are changing it up a bit. I've invited Justin Burns, a forensic accounting professional and fraud fighter to guest host the episodes. He's one of the friendliest and most personable professionals I've met in this space, and I'm excited for you all to meet him and his guests.
Justin Burns:
Hi, everyone. As Leah mentioned, I'm Justin Burns, managing partner of Space Coast Forensics in Brevard County, Florida, and I'm your host for this season of the Data Sleuth podcast. I'm excited to host this season titled, "Conversations about Fraud," where we'll tackle topics including embezzlement, collaborative divorce, economic damages, construction fraud, and more. In each episode, I'll be joined by an expert to help tell the story behind the numbers.
On today's episode of the Data Sleuth podcast, Matt Stelzman and I will talk about the business valuation process, how his report may change depending on the end user, what happens in engagements where a forensic accountant is involved in situations where the client has unreliable financial statements.
Matt Stelzman has over 20 years of experience in forensic litigation and valuations work. He's the office managing principal of the Windham Brannon Chattanooga office. He has worked on cases involving locally small-owned businesses and multi-billion dollar corporations. As part of the litigation process, Matt has spent time in the courtroom as an expert witness testifying on the results of his findings.
Hi, Matt. Thank you for joining me on today's episode. Thank you for being here.
Matt Stelzman:
Yeah, I appreciate the invite. Always nice to be involved in something like this.
Justin Burns:
So Matt, I know you work on a wide variety of valuation and litigation support engagements, including things like lost earnings, divorces, wrongful terminations, and of course business valuations, which is the topic of our episode today. Is there anything about the business valuation engagements that you maybe prefer over the other types of your work?
Matt Stelzman:
Yeah, it's interesting. I've been involved in this type of work since I graduated college. Actually, before I graduated college I was a runner in an accounting firm and they did valuation work. They did litigation work as well. And when I graduated he said, "Hey, do you want to help me do this stuff," and so I jumped on board and said, "Sure, I don't have any other options." I was still in college and so that was my first job offer.
And the reason why I chose to do that is because it was different than what I was seeing on the accounting side of things. Accounting felt really rule-based, a lot of checklists and things like that and valuation had this rule-based portion to it, but there's also this subjectivity portion as well. A lot of people in valuation like to refer to it as the art and science. Some people say the craft and science, but the reality is just it's rule-based and it's subjectivity. And so that's different than your accounting side of things. It's mostly compliance-type work, especially in the audit side of things. So that's one of the reasons why I chose the valuation route.
And then I've come to find in my later years that someone who does the valuation and the litigation side of things is a rare animal. I didn't know that. I've always done it that way, and that has come to be something that I've just realized is rare in this type of work. So again, the compliance and the non-compliance was the draw to this type of thing. It allows you to be a little bit more flexible than your typical accounting job.
But I think even further than that, one of the bigger items that I like about it is the personal touch side of things. You're not just behind a desk cranking out numbers. You might be at the beginning, but once you get more into understanding how valuation works, you transition more over to that subjectivity side of things to where you understand that valuation is not just about plugging numbers. It's not about, hey, I've got these income statements and balance sheets. I input these numbers, it spits out a number, and there you have it. There's a major subjectivity portion to it.
So you get to hear people's stories about how they started their business, how they got into the work that they're in, what they like about their industry. You get to understand how people make money, which is really cool actually. There's a lot of people that make a lot of money that you would never expect that that's how they do it, just the industries that they're in. It's just mind-blowing.
There's one guy, for example, that would fish stuff out of garbage dumpsters at carpet companies, and he was a recycler, so he would bring that back. He would figure out a way to make a machine that would recycle that and made a good bit of money doing that. That was one of those items where you're like, I didn't see that coming at all, literally dumpster diving. But it's understanding what their passion is, how they make money doing it, and how they differ from their competitors, and that's really what the draw is for the valuation side of things for me.
Justin Burns:
And you touched on it, and I came from audit, so I definitely don't miss running through those audit checklists and doing all of that stuff. But you made another great point of accounting, especially audit and tax, is what has already happened, what is in the past. And the valuations you're getting into, okay, how does that project out into the future, which is an interesting look at it that a lot of accountants don't really do, especially in public accounting.
Matt Stelzman:
Yeah, it's funny you say that because we have a, he's actually a very good referral source, but he loves to give one of my partners grief about, "Well, you're just an accountant. You just look at the past." He's a consultant, he does consulting for a certain industry, and he just likes to harass him about how accountants look at the past and that he's looking at the future and that type of thing. And I think it's unfair a little bit to the accountants. They don't always look at the past, but a lot of what they're doing is looking at history and how does that conform to the standards and the rules and is everything correct.
Valuation is the exact opposite. The value of any company is the future cash flows. Now, we might look at the past as a proxy for the future, but the reality is, is you're always looking at what are the future cash flows. No one is buying what happened in the past. They're buying what they think can happen in the future, so you're spot on with the future outlook versus the past.
Justin Burns:
And I don't do any valuations work. I'm strictly doing forensic accounting. I refer out valuations work to other people, and we just talked about how it's a lot different than your typical accounting. So what exactly goes into a business valuation? What does that process look like? You talked about projecting future cash flows. Can you tell me more about just the process of coming to a valuation for a business?
Matt Stelzman:
Yeah, so we can go as in-depth as you want on this. I'll keep it surface level and then you can dive in and ask questions where you want, so feel free to interrupt whenever.
So how it starts is we get a referral, like you would any other referral, whether a web lead or someone calls you up based upon work that you've done in the past with someone that recommended you, but you get the call. And the first thing is that I think a lot of people miss, is the first thing is just to listen, identify what it is that they're asking because sometimes what they think they need is not what they need, and that goes in both directions. They might think that they need this small-level valuation, if they even know that they need one, and what you end up having to tell them is, "Hey, this is a bigger item. This is a bigger task than you think it is, and here's why."
If you're doing evaluation for estate purposes or any gift tax or anything like that, that's going to the IRS. So you know that, first of all, you're going to have scrutiny by the IRS. They have certain standards that they want to see in a valuation report. So there are different levels of valuation reports. The lowest level would be something like if you're doing some type of business planning or you just want to know where you stand value-wise for your company.
And then as you get up through the levels of reporting, you have your summary report and your detailed report, which are more in depth, but the IRS requires that they need a package that they can read the whole report and understand how the company operates, what it does, everything about it. They want an all encompassing in one report. So you might get that call, they think they need one thing, you give them the unfortunate news that they need the higher report.
Or they might call up and say, "Hey, I need this report. I want to know everything," and you say, maybe it's, "Hey, you don't need all of this." We can just give you schedules and you can get an idea of what the value is of your company. Or hey, maybe you don't even need evaluation. I've run into those situations.
So first it's listening, understanding what they need and informing them what you think it should be, what the level of service is. And then from there what happens is you send out an engagement letter, you send out a data request. And in that data request is asking for all the typical financial information that you would usually ask for, income statements, balance sheets, all kinds of financial information that you're looking for.
Then what we do is we put all of that into our model. And what I mean by model is over years we've created a way that we can make these things more efficient so that we can lower the price as much as we can, but we have ways of, just like anything else, we have ways of putting these things in to make it more efficient for us.
So we put the information into the model and then we set up a management interview. And again, valuation, a value of a company is based upon really three things. It is cash flow, it is the growth of your company, and then it's risk. And so what the management interview is intended to do is to, A, answer questions on the financial information that you might have. Hey, why did this number jump up so much? Why did it decrease this amount? Are there personal expenses in here that we need to add back? Things like that.
But the other part of it is identifying risk. Is your company more risky than another company in the industry that an investor could also buy? If it's more risky, then you should need a higher return. If it's less risky, you should require less of a return. So that's the purpose of why we're asking or doing the site visit.
If you don't do that, it's similar to buying a house. If you buy a house and you never go in it, you never see that house A has all of this hardwood in it and it's got all of the crown molding and all of the stuff that makes it worth a premium over house B. If you never go and look at it, you'll never know that. So that's what we're doing with businesses is we're trying to gain an understanding of what makes this company unique from a risk perspective.
The next thing what we do is we perform an analysis with our customized models. Like I said, we put all that information in, we take our notes that we made from when we talked to the business owner and we factor in what the risk is.
Finally, we issue draft schedules for discussion with the business owner. And so it might be that we get through the whole thing and we say, "Hey, here's what we came up with." And they say, "Well, you missed the mark here. Maybe you didn't understand what I was saying." We'll go back. We'll make the tweaks, if necessary, and then the final report is what we issue after that.
Justin Burns:
Okay. You mentioned if your audience is the IRS, you're doing one thing. I'm assuming your process or your report at least changes based on your audience. If you're doing this for the IRS, they have something that they are specifically looking for. If you were doing this as part of an acquisition or a sale, how does that affect your process and your report and is there other factors at play that you, other reports that you issue depending on the situation?
Matt Stelzman:
So I think it's less about changing the report and more about customizing it. So each project has a different purpose. And so for example, litigation, those are going to be you're always going to have the highest level of report for litigation. And so litigation is a different animal in the sense you go through those same steps, but at the end you've got things like depositions, your attorneys will probably want you to be in the mediation. You've got trial, testimony and preparation and all that kind of stuff that comes along with it. I view that as the add-on, the tack-on.
If we're talking about just the valuation report itself, it's going to depend upon the specifics of the task or the specifics of the case that you're working on. So let me give you an example of what I'm talking about. So I recently worked on a construction company, and there was something very unique about this company that you wouldn't typically run into and that wasn't noticeable at the outset, but when we had the management interview, suddenly it became very evident.
And so this construction company, they have been around for a long time. The father began the construction company. He has run it for years and years and years. The father had recently passed away, so we were doing it for estate tax purposes. What we found out is that the business only has one customer, and the customer hires them to remodel certain types of stores. So they are the go-to people nationwide for this particular company when they want to remodel one of their stores.
So first of all, you've got a major risk. You've got one customer, and so dad started the construction company and he owns 100% of the company. His son doesn't own any of it, but his son maintains the relationship with the one client. So now you've got this weird dichotomy of dad owns the company that has one client, but son has the relationship with the client that supports the dad's 100% interest in the company. So what you have to do is you have to step back and say, "Okay, what would a third party pay for this weird situation that you have?"
So a third party comes in, he buys 100% of dad's ownership interest in the company, son doesn't have a non-compete. So son can at any point walk across the street, set up shop and contact his one client and pull that one client away from the business. So I had to ask, "What would you pay for it?" And the answer is I wouldn't pay much of anything for it, but the company was very profitable. So you've got this dichotomy of trying to figure out how do I take this multi-million dollar company and say it's not worth anything and make the IRS understand that that's the case. So you have to figure out ways to work in the risk portion of that. The risk is extremely high for that.
So it's almost to the point to where you question your sanity of, well, I've got to crank up what we call customer or company-specific risk. It is the specific risk to that company that is not inherent in any other company. So we have to crank that percentage up really high to get that value to be really low. And so what it really comes down to is the value of that company is worth what the cost is to create it. Because if I'm a buyer, I look at it and say, "I can pay you millions of millions of dollars to take on this risk of the son leaving and starting somewhere else and now I have nothing, or I can just create a company from scratch and I've got the same thing essentially."
So that was one of those situations that we had to work through and try to figure out how in the heck are we going to do this because it is a complicated manner that requires a specific customization of that report for that particular instance. And that doesn't happen every time, but that's one instance where it was it caught me off guard and we had to figure out how to handle that.
Justin Burns:
Yeah, I imagine that's the extreme side of it where, I mean your value is really just like, okay, what are the legal fees to get the business set up? How much does the equipment cost, just getting it in place to be able to do that work because I mean your revenue concentration is a hundred percent just all from one source.
Matt Stelzman:
And there are no contracts in place, so they can just at any point say that, "We're leaving, thanks."
Justin Burns:
Everything.
Matt Stelzman:
So you can imagine that the risk of that company is extremely high.
Justin Burns:
Oh gosh, that is, that's extreme.
Matt Stelzman:
But I mean, I think in normal circumstances, most of the reports are similar in nature. Again, you've got the three different levels. The first level is just basically a letter with schedules attached that say, "Hey, here's the value that we came up with. Here are the schedules."
Then you've got your middle level that includes company write-up and the different methodologies that you used and things like that, but it doesn't go really into detail about the economy and the industry and things like that.
And then your last report is the all-encompassing company background, the background of the owners, the history of it, industry information, economic information, the methodology that's used, the methodology that is considered and not used. So it really gets into what the client wants and sometimes what the client needs.
Justin Burns:
I think we're at a good stopping point for an ad break. So we're going to just take a break and we'll be right back.
Speaker 4:
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Justin Burns:
All right, and we're back with Matt Stelzman. So Matt, before the break we talked about the different levels of reporting you do for your business valuations, engagements. I'm a forensic accountant so I'm always interested in how I interact with valuations experts. So can we talk about maybe your client has a forensic accountant involved because there's maybe known or suspected fraud that's occurring or has occurred in the business. So they've engaged you to perform a valuation, but they're going through this forensic evaluation first. So how would you advise them in these situations? What would you do?
Matt Stelzman:
So if a company is going through a forensic investigation, it's important that they understand that that process needs to finish first. The foundation of any valuation is its financial statements, and if the company has identified that there is some kind of forensic activity or something that's going on that's making the financial statements not accurate, A, we need to know that in the valuation. But B, that whole process needs to be completed first. We need to get those financial statements either adjusted or reissued. And then once that happens, those can be passed along to us as the foundational financial statements that we use in the valuation.
It's funny, we are working on a case currently now, and it's not fraud. I don't want to say that, but it's financial statements that are not to the level that we would like. Typically, when you look at financial statements for a company, especially if they give you access to their QuickBooks, you're able to go back throughout the years and look at the backup for the year-end numbers.
So for example, if I wanted to look at what made up total travel expense, I could go back in the details of the financial statements and I can look and see when each of those travel expenses were booked. And so what that allows me to do is identify areas that might be or might need adjustment. So if there are personal travel expenses versus company travel expenses, in a valuation we adjust out those travel expenses that are personal in nature because they're not part of company operations. So therefore what that does is that increases the bottom line or the profitability of your company when we adjust out personal expenses like that.
So when you have financial statements that don't provide that information, it makes valuation a lot more difficult. We're dealing with a situation now, it's a divorce. We were hired by the wife's attorney to provide a valuation of the husband's company. And what we found is the financial statements that were, we were actually given access to QuickBooks, and we found in the QuickBooks that the financial statements, the numbers in there are only year-end adjustments. And what I mean by that is there is no entries into the books throughout the year.
So what happens at the end of the year, they take all of their receipts, or whatever it is that they have, they allocate that towards, in this case they have different locations that they're operating. So they'll take, hey, we were in this location for this long. We had this amount of sales, this amount of expenses. Boom, we enter that into QuickBooks on December 31, and that's our financial statements. And the problem that creates is we can't go back and look at all the specifics that go into those financial statements, so we would love to have more detailed financial statements.
So what do we do in a situation like that? This is one of those areas where we have to be creative because first of all, we know that this is litigation. We know that it's going to be very detailed. So the attorneys are going to look for every possible way to discredit you. And your testimony, though you're testifying on the numbers that you put out there, your testimony is only as good as your credibility. And if your credibility is shot because you didn't perform the right level of analysis, well then your numbers don't mean a whole lot. So what we have to do is figure out how do we navigate the waters of these financial statements that don't give us details.
Justin Burns:
I mean I would think if your financial statements are unreliable, your valuation can't be reliable.
Matt Stelzman:
Correct, right. And so there are ways to we'll call it buffer yourself in those situations, and really that comes down to the due diligence that you put into your case.
So in a situation like this, when you receive financial statements that either are fraudulent or are not detailed enough for you to provide the work, there's a few steps that you need to take to prop yourself up per se in your position. So what I recommend doing is first identifying that the financial statements are not providing the information that you need. So you need to reach out to your attorney and say, "Hey, I need you to contact," in this case it was the husband because he was the business owner, "his attorney, and ask for detailed information." Now it might come back that they say, "Well, we don't have that." So what you have is the best that you're going to get. At least you asked for it. So that's a question that they can't ask in court. "Well, did you ask for more detailed information?"
"Well, no." That's a problem, so you need to ask for that. You need to ask for a management interview so you can ask the business owner himself while you're sitting there, "Hey, what about these financial statements? I see that they're year-end adjustments. Do you have details?"
"Well, no I don't." You can log that and you can have that as backup. So it's things like that that you can ask for. And if they say no, then you have that in your arsenal and you should probably put that in your report and say, "I asked for a management interview. They told me no. I asked for more detailed information. They didn't provide it," so that way when the attorney asked you those questions on the stand, you can say, "I asked for that. You didn't provide it," and that keeps them from going down that path. They might ask the question the first time, but they'll shut it down real quick and move on to something else.
So in this case, we've done that and during that process I had to get creative. So I had to reach out to the client or the client of the attorney that hired us. I'm careful not to say our client because it's not our client, the attorney is, and I had a conversation with her and I said, "Look, we don't have the financial information that we need, that I would typically want to have a evaluation that I can put a stamp on and say, "Hey, I'm a hundred percent sure that everything is accurate," because we weren't provided that information, but we still need a number."
And so I discussed with her that she had been provided a settlement statement, and that basically is the other side saying, "Here's how we're dividing your assets." So we knew what number they put on the value of the business. And I said, "There's a lot of things that are missing from these financial statements, and we can go through each one of these and we can do a deep dive and we can pull bank statements and receipts and we can spend a ton of time and come up with something that is fairly accurate, but we're talking five years here. That's going to be super expensive. And I don't know that the payoff is going to be worth the time that you put in it."
So what we currently have is we have financial statements that don't have any adjustments at all. So what we're saying is all of the expenses on these financial statements are considered business expenses. That means the bottom line is going to be as low as it could possibly be. If the value that we come out with based upon those assumptions, if that value is higher than the value that they put on their settlement statement, is that worth it to you to say, "Hey, I don't want to, A, have to dig through five years worth of expenses to come up with a more accurate number that is only going to hurt the other side and help her. Do I want to do that? And B, is it worth even spending the time, that monumental amount of time that will take to do that prolonging the divorce process, which is painful enough, is it worth it to you to do that? Or is the number that we come up with, if it's higher than the settlement statement, is that worth it to say, "You know what, this is good enough?""
And so that was a question that I posed to her, and I think that's a valid question that we should all be asking our clients is it worth it to you? Now when I go in and testify, I will be able to say, "Hey, we didn't have this. We didn't have this information." And if they bring it up, "Well, then your number is incorrect," and my response will be, "It is incorrect, but it's correct based upon the numbers that you provided. You didn't provide any more detail. And if you provide more detail, it's only going to increase the value and hurt you, which shuts them down immediately. They don't want the value to be higher."
So we have ways of going through this type of thing. But it takes I think experience in dealing in the litigation process of knowing when and how to do that and how someone's going to respond in that process to understand when you can do that. So in this instance, that's how we are going to approach it unless they provide us with additional information.
So again, it takes a flexibility of not just following rules, but understanding that there are times where you need to be flexible and understand that the value or the conclusion that you're providing isn't exactly accurate, but it's the best that you have with the information that you're provided.
Justin Burns:
And I like how you talked about having the client service aspect in there because there's plenty of times where I'll take a consultation call and I'm talking to a potential client and they want me to go look at everything, and then we're like, "Okay, well how much can we really change these numbers by," and it's not that much.
I mean, I had a child support adjustment. They wanted me to do some forensic accounting on this guy has nine LLCs and they just wanted to change the child support adjustment. We're like, okay. We did a document request. We got thousands of pages worth of financial information. And I go back to the client, I'm like, "Okay, how much are you trying to get this thing adjusted by?"
"$300 a month," and there'd only be three or four years left of child support payments. It's like the amount you're going to have to spend for me to get through all of this stuff is way more than what you're going to get out of it on the other end if indeed there is enough there to support adjusting those child support payments.
Matt Stelzman:
Yeah, it's interesting that you bring that up because I had a situation that was almost identical to that probably maybe six months ago. The good part about it, and which hardly ever happens, you'll laugh when you hear this, is they encouraged the two experts to talk, which I think we should always do, but attorneys have their own reasons why they don't.
Justin Burns:
These people suggested that.
Matt Stelzman:
So we spoke and we both realized, hey, it's not going to be worth doing all of this. So it was funny because we came in with two different perspectives, but once we talked through it, we realized it's probably not worth all the effort that that's going to go into doing this. And it was just a good conversation, and I think we should do that more, but it doesn't happen as much as we would like it to.
Justin Burns:
That's actually what this attorney suggested on this case. And I was like, "Okay, well who's the other expert?" It's somebody I know and that I talk to not infrequently. And the attorney's like, "Okay, well I just need to get the all-clear from the other side to allow you guys to talk about this." So I've probably spoken to this other expert five or six times since then and have not brought up this case that we're both on because we haven't gotten the all-clear from the attorneys. And so it's just sitting there of I know you know I'm on it, and we both know we're each on it and we can't talk about it, so we haven't gotten the all-clear from the attorneys so we can't talk about it.
Matt Stelzman:
What you find is that when you have differences in numbers or values, or whatever it is that you're doing, that usually it's only a handful of things that makes it different, and they're usually assumptions. So if we can talk and we can work through it and say, "Well, what assumption are you making here?" And then you're like, "Well, that's actually not what happened or that is what happened," whichever the case may be, you can work through that and you might end up and say, "Hey, we agree to disagree," but a lot of times you realize, okay, I didn't have that bit of information, or I didn't consider that aspect. And it has to go both ways, both people have to be open to it.
But you find that it's you're really not that far apart. Even though your numbers are vastly different, it might be a couple of assumptions that are made that makes the difference huge. And I can say that especially in valuation. There's that company-specific risk that I talked about. If you change that by 1%, and depending upon your cash flow, you can be millions of dollars off just by that 1%, and that company-specific is a subjective number anyway. So you need to know what's going into that from both sides and understand what that number is comprised of so that you can know are we really that far off or is there an assumption being made that I wasn't aware of? And so if we could do more of that, that would be so great for the industry and really great for all the clients, honestly, as well.
Justin Burns:
Yeah, I mean I think it would make trial go much smoother as well. I mean, the last one I was in really it came down to we had some different information to base our assumptions off of and we're just like, "Oh, man. If I had that, I think I would agree with him."
Matt Stelzman:
But at the end of the day, like I said the attorneys, and I don't want to blame it all on attorneys, but they have an objective. They're wanting to get the most for their client. And if you let experts come together, then there's a potential of one side losing that verdict. And so I understand why they don't do it, but it would make life a whole lot easier for a whole lot of people if we could do more of that.
Justin Burns:
All right. Well, Matt, we're running out of time here. Just before we go, if our listeners want to connect with you, how do they get in touch with you? How do they find you?
Matt Stelzman:
Sure. So I would just go to our website. It's Windham Brannon, W-I-N-D-H-A-M, B-R-A-N-N-O-N, dot com. I would encourage you to go there because my bio's on the website, but also there's so much other stuff that we offer as a firm other than valuation and litigation support that again, you only know what in terms of what you need. So you might find something on the website that is, it might spark an interest or say, "Hey, I've been wondering about that and I didn't know that you guys did it." So I think that's probably the best route to go is go to the website, you can look up my bio, but while you're there, just peruse the site, see if there's anything in there that sparks interest. And if so, you can reach out to me or you can reach out to anyone else at the firm and happy to help you.
Justin Burns:
Perfect. We'll include a link to that website in the show notes so people can find you there and find Windham Brannon there. Thank you for joining me today. I feel like I learned a lot about valuations today.
Matt Stelzman:
I appreciate the invite. It's always good to talk about this type of stuff because I've found more and more that people are, they like to simplify valuation more than they should. It is everybody wants this, well, what's my number, or what's my multiple? And the reality is it's not that easy. It's really not. And you have the, I don't want to call it the opportunity, but you have the opportunity to leave a lot of money on the table, especially in transaction work by not knowing what the true value is and just going off of some random multiple that you heard somewhere.
There's a reason why in our standards that it says that rule of thumb multiples are not valuation methods. It's because they lead to incorrect results. And so I would encourage you if you're looking for a valuation for transaction or a divorce or anything like that, your business is too valuable. You've worked far too long on growing the business to just leave it up to a rule of thumb or some kind of chance to get the value out of it.
Justin Burns:
That's a great point. All right, and that's all the time we have for today. Thank you.
Matt Stelzman:
All right, thanks.
Leah Wietholter:
Thank you for listening to the Data Sleuth podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a review wherever you listen. The Data Sleuth podcast is a production of Workman Forensics. To learn more about our investigation services and resources, please visit workmanforensics.com.